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ICTJ World Report July 2013

8/1/13 8:58 AM

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ICTJ World Report July 2013
July 2013

In Focus
ICTJ Forum: Analysis of Ongoing Developments in Egypt and Colombia
In this edition of the ICTJ Forum, ICTJ's Paul Seils and Mohamed Abdel Dayem join Refik Hodzic for a discussion on the political turmoil in Egypt and the ongoing peace process in Colombia.
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World Report
AFRICA The International Criminal Court has delayed the trial of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta until November. A former partner of Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor – who has been accused of helping the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone - has been found in Freetown. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s government has opened a previously unopened collection of documents that she hopes will help Liberians move towards reconciliation. In Rwanda, genocide survivors are planning to create a global trust fund that will collect money for other Rwandan genocide survivors. A Canadian court found Jacques Mungwarere, a Rwandan refugee accused of participating in the Rwandan genocide, not guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Ex-president of Chad Hissene Habre refused to recognize a Senegalese court that has charged him with war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide. Sudan’s president Omar Al-Bashir, whom the ICC has charged with genocide in Darfur, fled Nigeria during a conference over fear of arrest. An attack by Congolese rebels forced 60,000 residents into neighboring Uganda. Impunity Watch condemned exhumations of mass

graves in Burundi for lacking forensic experts, while Amnesty International said Cote d’Ivoire needs to excavate well holes that may hold victims’ remains.
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AMERICAS In Canada, recently published research reports that aboriginal children and adults were once used as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments by government bureaucrats. In Colombia, the National Center for Historic Memory released its major report after 6 years of work –it states that some 220,000 Colombians were killed due to the armed conflict since 1958 -82% of those were civilian casualties. As a symbolic act, Guatemalan human rights organization CALDH distributed book copies of Rios Montt’s sentence to 80 years of prison for genocide and crimes against humanity among Ixil victims. The remains of Brazilian ex-president Joao Goulart will be exhumed to determine whether he was poisoned in the 1970s by rightwing rulers. In Argentina, several organizations and civil society groups have opposed president Fernandez’s decision to nominate Cesar Milani as Army Chief, because of his alleged participation in crimes against humanity during the dictatorship (1976-1983). The Chilean Supreme Court has approved the extradition of a former Argentine judge accused of human rights abuses during the 1976-1983 military rule. Uruguay launched the construction of an Armenian Genocide Museum – it will be the first one created by initiative of a State outside the territory of Armenia.
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ASIA Despite promises to treat religious minorities better in Myanmar, Muslim victims of the March 21 massacre have yet to receive justice and protection from the state. Taking steps towards reform, President Thein Sein dissolved a security force suspected on rights violations against Rohingya Muslims and ordered the release of 73 political prisoners. The police, meanwhile, arrested six Buddhists for allegedly participating in last year’s massacre of Muslim pilgrims in Arakan state. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Tribunal announced it may complete its second case against former regime leaders within the next two months. Sou Met, a former Khmer Rouge air force commander suspected of crimes against humanity, homicide and torture, died of diabetes and kidney failure at the end of June. Human rights groups criticized Afghanistan’s President Hamed Karzai for appointing new members to the main human rights body, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, without input from civil society. In the Philippines, a group of 7,000 victims of human rights violations under ex-president Ferdinand Marcos may each receive $1,000 in reparations from a $10 million settlement with an unidentified buyer of a valuable Monet painting allegedly part of the suspiciously-obtained Marcos art collection.
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In Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands trekked to the Srebrenica massacre memorial in Potocari, and 409 recently identified victims were reburied there. On the same day, the Hague Tribunal reinstated charges of genocide against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. To integrate Serbs in northern Kosovo, national parliament passed an amnesty law meant to integrate Serbs in northern Kosovo, which launched a petition over 12,500-strong to revise the law to better specify those who can receive amnesty for which crimes. Serbia denied benefits to families of 16 Bosniaks who were abducted in 1992. The Hague Tribunal decided to release Bosnian Serb Parliament Chief Momcilo Krajisnik after serving two-thirds of his 20-year sentence for forced migration of Bosniaks and Croats. Hungary has chosen to resume paying reparations to Hungarian Holocaust survivors living outside the country, which halted the payments after accusations of improper accounting. The Spanish police is hunting former and current leaders of the Polisario Front, which Spain’s highest criminal court has accused of genocide and other human rights violations against the Sahrawi forcibly held in the Tindouf camps in Algeria. Uruguay began building an Armenian Genocide museum, the first outside Armenia itself. Armenian psychologists will study how traumatic memory of the genocide is passed onto younger generations among 2,500 Armenians in the country and in the Diaspora.
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MENA Protests erupted into teargas firings onto civilians in Tunisia after the assassination of an opposition politician involved in drafting the country’s new constitution, the second such killing this year. Legislators have ended the general debate on the draft constitution and have delayed voting on a political isolation bill that would ban members of the former regime from office. After months of political wrangling between the president and the military and massive rival demonstrations for and against the president, Egypt’s military removed the country’s democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, who was then replaced by Chief Justice Adly Mansour. Since the regime change, the military has clashed with Islamist pro-Morsi protesters several times, with the latest and deadliest incident killing scores of Morsi supporters. Libya began drafting its new constitution by authorizing a constitutional commission to create the document, which will be written by 60 Libyans representing the country’s three main regions with at least six seats for women and six for ethnic minorities. A ministerial committee in Yemen finished drafting an apology to the south and Sa’ada for the “unjust war” in 1994. Israel’s High Court rejected a petition to ban the military’s use of white phosphorous – an toxic incendiary that has been used in populated areas. At the end of the month, Israel and Palestine resumed peace talks in Washington.
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Publications
Reparations in Peru: From Recommendations to Implementation
This report evaluates the government of Peru’s partial results in
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=1d074ab001e1717ab129127f6&id=bd9deef285&e=134c21ea25

Upcoming Events
September 30 - October 04, 2013

5th Intensive Course on Truth Commissions

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ICTJ World Report July 2013

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providing compensation to victims of the internal armed conflict that devastated the country from 1980 to 2000. It provides a detailed analysis of the process of implementing the Comprehensive Reparations Plan, established on the basis of recommendations made by the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (2003).
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Location: Barcelona, Spain View Details

September 09 - 13, 2013

Economic and Social Dimensions of Transitional Justice: ETJN 2013 Summer School
Location: University of Essex View Details

Drafting a Truth Commission Mandate: A Practical Tool
This publication is intended to facilitate the process of drafting a mandate for a truth commission charged with the nonjudicial investigation of serious human rights violations.
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